Why Is CDC Trying to Put a Mask on Your Face Again?

(by Jeffrey A. Tucker | Brownstone Institute) – We know the wicked truth about Chairman Mao’s “Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom.” He said this in 1957 while inviting anyone to criticize the Communist Party. There were cheers all around and the criticisms were unleashed. This lasted six weeks, after which many of the biggest critics were shot. It was a bait and switch.

It’s a brilliant tactic for evil regimes. Ferret out the enemy and then make them go away.

That’s not exactly what happened this week but the analogy works. A judge in Florida this week struck down the Biden administration’s transportation mask mandate. The opinion was highly technical and turned entirely on issues of administrative law. The judge ruled that the Public Health Service Act of 1944, the first ever to give the quarantine power to the federal government, did not authorize the imposition of universal mandates on what is really an article of clothing in the name of “sanitation.”

Instead, what appeared to happen here was entirely arbitrary. The Biden administration wanted masks and the CDC imposed them, including with criminal penalties. For a full year, travelers have been hectored and threatened at every turn.

After the court decision, a hundred flowers bloomed in the form of air-born celebrations from coast to coast.

Will it last? Not if our rulers in DC get their way.

But let’s be clear about something. It’s about masks but more. The mask is a metaphor for all the controls, restrictions, impositions, mandates, closures, and resulting wreckage of the past two years. People hate them because they are so personal. More precisely, they are depersonalizing, which is precisely how the lockdown period of American history has felt the entire time.

We are our faces, to others and ourselves. Take that away and what are we? We are tools. We are pawns. We are lab rats for their experiments. Masks are dehumanizing because they are supposed to be. The mask has a very long history as a tool of subjection and enslavement. We all know this intuitively. Read Full Article >